Posts by pprotus

So tablets, if you want to get anything done travelling get a ... yes, a laptop

One of the best...

...review-plus-video articles I've seen this year. Keep up the good work.

Microsoft shows off South Korean PC-on-a-stick

Different target market?

Good size hi-res monitors are already absurdly expensive, and the larger ones are nearly impossible to transport. Likewise a decent size qwerty keyboard with numeric keypad area takes-up more space in a garment bag than i'm willing to sacrifice. I'm thinking that a business model like the 2000 Kinko's once had...where one can casually rent a work area with computer, mouse, keyboard, display(s), internet access, etc...might work out well for people who travel frequently for business reasons, and who can carry their core computer hardware in a shirt pocket. Now, if we could only get border security agents to cease cloning one's mass storage whenever one crosses a national boundary...

That Google ARM love-in: They want it for their own s*** and they don't want Bing having it

Ya don't know, what ya don't know...

One of the benefits of designing your own, full-custom processor, from scratch, is that you end-up having a good idea of what's inside. Intel (and AMD, in the past) have both admitted to the inclusion of circuitry that, with a little external hardware, permits the packaged processor to act as it's own microprocessor emulator...with complete access to everything within a system. The design of said external hardware (and the software/firmware to make it all function) is a closely guarded secret. But given that both companies have occasionally hired 3rd party assembly houses to fab the hardware, and contractors to write the software, it would be amazing if the NSA, among others, does not already possess copies of all variations of the HW, SW, and manuals that exist. The unanswered question is... Does Intel and/or AMD include enough circuitry and flash memory within a processor package to allow a processor with network access to communicate in-band and to download and execute tasks without using any external (to the package) system resources?

Icon: If this were not an anonymous posting, I'd use Big Brother...since the idea of building snoop capability into every processor on earth would seem obvious to him.

Fragged, fragged and thrice fragged! 20 years of id Software’s Doom

I really shouldn't post this...but it's been 20 years...

As a bit of vintage trivia... I was a full-time employee of Intel's SSD when the original Doom zipfile hit the interwebs. This is (the? one of the?) Intel Division that had two names. Intel "Scalable Server Division" and Intel "Supercomputer Systems Division". The corporate culture in SSD (we only used the three initials) was totally and adversarially different from anything I have ever experienced at any other Intel facility. For all practical purposes, we were our own start-up. And main Intel was a potential hostile-take-over entity. We used the original Doom as part of our single-board (multiple processor) system-level stress testing process. This may or may not be due in part to the large number U of W engineers on the development team. If the node board ran Doom for a certain number of hours on all application processors and under all corner conditions, then it was good to go to the next level of system integration. (Run Doom OK? Cool. Level up.) I really miss SSD. We were tasked to produce a One T-flop supercomputer. We delivered "Asci Red" which ran at Two T-flops, sustained, when using the appropriate benchmark software. All this being said... Please, if you will, try to imagine being a young squirt of an engineer, playing Doom...the first, first-person-shooter to exist in all the world...in multi-player mode, where each player has a supercomputer node board as his/her dedicated hardware, while using a half-rack of node boards and a RAID as the game server, with all game data being exchanged via an ultra high-speed (for its time) backplane. Ping of 2? No problem. It was pretty nice.

Dell uncloaks trio of muscular mobile workstations

Yet another motorcycle with a V8 engine...

What? No 1920x1280 video? How about 1980x1200?

I guess that I will not be buying one of these, either. Maybe Asus will detect the money in my bank account that is currently awaiting a portable product having reasonable performance and adequate resolution for development work.

Is this some bizarre by-product of the new economic environment? Companies like Dell have decided to make products that customers like myself decline to purchase, thus coercing me to keep my funds in an investment account?